Reproductive rights are under attack. Dominique Lee is up for the challenge.
‘How do we be stewards for women who aren’t in Massachusetts?’ DOMINIQUE LEE, president and chief executive, Planned Parenthood
League of Massachusetts
Dominique Lee is not one to shy away from a challenge. In fact, she courts it.
After working at Planned Parenthood centers in California and Massachusetts in the early 2000s, she wanted to know what it was like to be in a state where authorities were hostile to reproductive rights and did all they could to limit access to abortion including cutting public funding. So, she raised her hand to go to Arizona.
“That’s where I actually needed to be and utilize my knowledge,” she said. “Everybody thought I was crazy.”
Today that experience has prepared her to confront the greatest threat to reproductive rights in a half-century: last year’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion. Antiabortion forces want to further restrict reproductive rights, seeking a national ban on abortion and filing a federal lawsuit to ban mifepristone, a drug commonly used in medication abortions. Half of all abortions are performed with pills.
Lee, 39, recently returned to Boston as the new president and chief executive of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, overseeing four clinics that serve more than 40,000 patients annually. Planned Parenthood performs over half of the abortions in the state, as well as pro
vides other types of sexual and reproductive health care. Its centers in Springfield and Worcester play an outsized role providing more than 90 percent of abortion care in their regions.
Leaders like Lee have become an essential bulwark to protecting abortion rights everywhere. Already, Planned Parenthood locations in Massachusetts have seen an uptick in patients traveling to New England from states where abortion has been banned or severely restricted since Roe was overturned.
“How do we be stewards for women who aren’t in Massachusetts?” Lee said in an interview. “It’s incredibly important for us to be a shining example and representation of what good looks like and to maintain that moving forward.”
Lee, who is of Indigenous and Chinese descent, is the first person of color to lead Planned Parenthood in Massachusetts. She succeeds Dr. Jennifer Childs-Roshak, the first physician to lead the branch. ChildsRoshak stepped down at the end of last year.
Wanda McClain, chair of the board of Planned Parenthood in Massachusetts, said Lee’s courage and willingness to take on tough fights, as in Arizona, impressed the search committee.
“She doesn’t seem to back down from things that are hard, and even here in Massachusetts, where we have so much support — legislatively, the governor, and in so many regards, there’s still more for us to do,” McClain said. “She’s up for a challenge.”
Lee charted an unconventional path to the corner office. Growing up in the San Francisco area, she left home when she was 16 to escape what she described as a “pretty tumultuous traumatic childhood.” She dropped out of high school to work full-time and pay her bills. Ultimately, it took her nine years across three different institutions to get her bachelor’s degree.
Lee first came to Boston in 2006, following a boyfriend who lived here. She needed a job and saw a posting on Craigslist to be a health care assistant at Planned Parenthood. She knew the organization as a patient because her mother brought Lee there to manage her endometriosis, a painful condition of the uterus.
“I had thought I was moving here for love in the traditional sense but actually became a love of my career and what I do for a living,” Lee said.
After a couple of years, Lee was tapped to open a new center for Planned Parenthood in Los Angeles. But after a few years, she wondered what it would be like to work in a state where abortion rights were under fire and funding was hard to come by.
Lee arrived in Arizona in 2012, serving as a director of operational standards and later of patient services. Even though Roe was still the law of the land back then, Arizona passed burdensome laws aimed at limiting access with frequent visits from the Department of Health seeking violations that could shut clinics down.
“You are under a microscope to do everything perfect,” she said.
After three years, she returned to California and Planned Parenthood’s biggest affiliate, which serves about 250,000 patients annually in central California and Nevada. She left her post as chief operating officer in 2022 to finish her MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and to pivot to a new career as a strategic consultant at global design firm IDEO in its Chicago office.
But when a recruiter called about the Planned Parenthood role in Massachusetts, she felt like she had to explore it.
“If I hadn’t started here, my path of life would have been radically different,” Lee said. “What I got from this affiliate was that true empowerment of myself, and the women who were my mentors and at various affiliates saw the potential in me that I didn’t.”
As chief executive, Lee wants to make sure the Massachusetts affiliate continues to lead on clinical training, advocacy, and research.
“Very rarely in a role do you get to come to work and say you change the trajectory of people’s lives every day and truly mean that,” she said. “This is like a dream job, a hard dream job.”